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DEThe willingness of US authorities to declassify and make these research results available to the public enables an open scientific discussion today about the limits and potential of consciousness-expanding methods.
The Stargate Project was an initiative funded by the U.S. military and intelligence agencies in the 1970s to research remote viewing, which was conducted by the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) until its termination in 1995. The goal was to use extrasensory perception to spy on hidden locations or events.
Unconscious Information Processing
People certainly have the ability to access the vast amount of unconscious memory content accumulated over the course of their entire lives. In remote viewing, however, primarily only implicit memory is addressed, which often comes to the fore in trance-like states, as it is the natural reaction of the psyche when actual waking consciousness is weakened.
The term is therefore incorrect, as «remote viewing» or «remote perception» implies that a person is able to retrieve another person’s conscious content or data from a distance. What actually happens in this process, however, is that the subject delves into their own subconscious. This should not be underestimated in terms of the knowledge it contains. Within this subconscious, an attempt is now made to consciously retrieve knowledge. This is often very imprecise and unreliable. It is the process of reading one’s own subconscious, which is fraught with immense hurdles, yet is by no means «cross-personal retrieval of information» - and above all, it is not a «snapshot.»
Furthermore, this information is not secret information or information that one could not have perceived during one’s lifetime. While one might assume that emotional intuition can also provide information that could then be very useful for analysis in context, it is still not a snapshot of another person and corresponds entirely to one’s own conscious content.
The method attempted by the military to «decouple» the body from space and time - which resembles spiritual or esoteric concepts of «astral travel» - is also impossible insofar as consciousness does not constitute a separate «entity.» In short, attempting to decouple the body from consciousness is akin to the principle of trying to separate an observer «from itself.» The problem here lies in our worldly view of the human being, which separates the body and consciousness from one another. Here, an attempt is made to «separate» the «I-consciousness» (the observer, the narrative self), yet separation from the I-consciousness is merely an illusion, since both existence and separation from the narrative self are built upon the same foundation: a single thought.
Remote perception and its transcendent limits
Even if the military had succeeded, and assuming the theory that a person possesses the necessary inner maturity and observational ability to completely outwit their own superconsciousness (depending on the definition, also the Higher Self, Holy Spirit, or transpersonal self), and to literally «confront» it, the greatest obstacle would remain the «will of God,» which, as the final authority within structures of consciousness, now assumes control here and overrides the autonomy of the narrative self, including even the superconscious.
When people have encounters with the supernatural, such as flashes of light, special dreams, or even encounters with God, this is such a moment when a spark passes from the superconscious into the narrative self. The higher consciousness is a superordinate organizing principle - whether interpreted as religious transcendence or fundamental scientific laws - that functions as an information barrier and prevents individual consciousness from accessing transpersonal contents of consciousness.
Realistically, if at all, this would involve remote perception occurring in the «interest of the collective superconscious.» But since this simply becomes a sacred matter, the military’s project presumably failed precisely at this point: because of the holiness of God and the lack of spiritual training among the recruits.
Even if the religious context is taken into account at this point, it is essential to exclude it as soon as higher consciousness and the fundamental questions of existence are concerned, since humans have, after all, been attempting for millennia to explain an event through various sacred works and methods - an event that scientifically will likely remain intangible for a long time to come, and is probably not even meant to be: God.
It therefore remains, within a scientific context, a purely «matter of faith.»